Many people are affected by a variety of health problems including obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol levels which can be linked to poor habits in diet, exercise, and the like. Although people are generally aware that controlling diet, exercise, and similar lifestyle habits is the easiest way to become or stay healthy, getting them to adopt and maintain these habits is a difficult task. Many people do not have access to information or to systems or methods that can effectively assist them in these challenging endeavors.
There are many well-known diet and exercise regimes. When using these known regimes, however, individuals must determine what to eat and when to eat as well as calculate the calories they have consumed (e.g., by determining the calorie count of all foods or adding points that are tied to the calorie counts of certain foods) and they must keep an exercise record and determine the caloric impact of their exercise on their overall regime. Another problem with current diet and exercise regimes is that they restrict severely the types of food individuals can consume or the types of activities in which they are guided to participate. This lack of variety causes individuals to become frustrated with their regimes and to give up before they have experienced their desired results.
There are a few known methods and systems for assisting individuals with the maintenance of healthy lifestyle habits, but these methods and systems are expensive and often inaccessible to most people. For example, a highly effective method for assisting individuals in developing and maintaining healthy lifestyle habits is found through the use of coaching. Research has shown that individuals are more successful in the difficult endeavor of changing their habits and maintaining new, healthier ones when they are coached throughout the process. Coaching keeps individuals motivated, provides positive reinforcement, and introduces a narrowly-tailored plan for each individual participant. However, obtaining a reliable human coach is difficult and often prohibitively expensive such that relatively few individuals are actually able to use one. In addition to purchasing the services of a human coach, it has been shown that the services of a personal chef, who is trained in preparing healthy meals, and/or those of a nutritionist, who is able to develop a personalized diet plan, are successful methods for an individual to be assisted in maintaining healthy lifestyle habits, but these methods are also expensive and thus inaccessible to many.
In an attempt to make the services of coaches, nutritionists, personal chefs, and the like accessible to those who could not afford them otherwise, many books have been written and/or home videos produced that focus on disseminating the type of expert information these individuals typically offer their clients. Unfortunately, those who invest in these books and/or videos are noticeably less likely to maintain the healthy lifestyle habits they aim to encourage than those who invest in the actual expert services. The mass marketed materials are aimed at a wide audience and cannot meet the needs of each individual purchaser. The difference that actual health and fitness experts can provide is the ability to provide their clients with appropriate plans and strategy messages with modifications tailored to the individual thereby reducing or eliminating the various barriers to success.
In light of these foregoing problems with known systems and methods, there is a need for a generally affordable and accessible system and method that assists in the maintenance of healthy lifestyle habits by providing individual users with a diet and exercise regime specifically tailored around their personal preferences so that they are not restricted to the point that they become frustrated thus discontinuing their practice of the regime's healthy habits. Additionally, there is a need for a system and method that assists individual users in determining what foods they should be eating, when they should be eating, and/or in what activities they should be participating. The system and method should account for an individual user's preferences, including preferences for meal preparation. Furthermore, the system and method should provide individual users with personalized guidance and strategy similar to that which can be provided by health and fitness experts in order to maximize the probability that individuals will successfully maintain healthy lifestyle habits.